Tag Archives: Christian

News

Muslims attack unarmed Christians in India and Turkey

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Story from the Hindu.

Excerpt:

Two activists of the Popular Front of India (PFI) were arrested on Monday in connection with the attack on a professor at Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district. Sources said 12 others, most of them with extremist links, were also taken into custody for interrogation.

Ashraf, 37, of Mundeth, Mekalady, and Jaffar, 28, of Eramaloor, Kothamangalam, were remanded to judicial custody by the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court, Muvattupuzha.

The right palm of T.J. Joseph, 53, professor of Malayalam in the Newman College, Thodupuzha, was chopped off by the assailants on Sunday. He, along with his mother and sister, was returning home from church when a gang of six waylaid his car and attacked him with an axe.

PFI is a Muslim organization. Kerala is not reputed to be a particularly extremist state. I heard that TN and AP are the two best ones. Maybe Shalini can correct me.

And I think the general trend in India is in favor of more religious liberty for Christians. But not so in Turkey.

National Review reports on more violence in Turkey.

Excerpt:

For all the attention Turkey has gotten lately, very few Americans are aware that the Roman Catholic bishop serving as apostolic vicar of Anatolia was stabbed to death and decapitated last month by an assailant shouting, “Allahu Akbar! I have killed the great Satan!”

There are fewer than 60 Catholic priests in all of Turkey, and yet Bishop Luigi Padovese was the fifth of them to be shot or stabbed in the last four years, starting with the murder of Fr. Andrea Santoro in 2006, also by an assailant shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” (An Armenian journalist and three Protestants working at a Christian publishing house — one of them German, the other two Turkish converts — were also killed during this period.)

What’s going on? Why has traditionally secularist Turkey, with its minuscule Christian community (less than 0.2 percent of the population), lately become nearly as dangerous for Christians as neighboring Iraq? And why has this disturbing pattern of events so far escaped notice in the West?

In a nutshell, all these violent acts reflect a popular culture increasingly shaped by Turkish media accounts deliberately promoting hatred of Christians and Jews.

As it happens, Bishop Padovese was murdered on the same day (June 3) that the Wall Street Journal published an eye-opening report on how Turkey’s press and film industry have increasingly blurred the distinction between fact and fantasy, especially since the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002.

“To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness.” That’s how Robert L. Pollock, editorial-features editor of the Journal, summed up the trajectory of the daily fare that shapes Turks’ attitudes toward the outside world — and toward non-Muslims in their midst. Indeed, much of what passes for fact in Turkish public discourse would be comical if not for the deadly consequences.

Turkey is really starting to scare me. They’re going the wrong way.

Polemics

Should Christians abandon changed-life evangelism?

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Here’s a post by Biola University professor Clay Jones again.

Excerpt:

One of the most common approaches to witnessing is to tell people how your life was transformed from awful to awesome. You know what I mean. Something like “before I was a Christian my marriage was on the rocks, I was depressed, was on the verge of being fired from my job, and wondered whether life was worth living. Once I became a Christian, however, my marriage improved, I started getting along better with my boss, and I’m happier.” The idea behind this is that if you come to Jesus your life will get better here. I call it “improved lifestyle witnessing.”

Many Christians encourage this as a method of evangelism. After all, it is easy to do, it is something you can remember because it is about you, and it is irrefutable because you are telling people things that actually happened to you. As a method of evangelism then, what’s not to like? Right?

Wrong.

He then goes through a half-dozen or so problems with lifestyle evangelism.

Here’s my favorites.

First, consider that just about every cult and religion in the world does the same thing. How many cults or false religions say, “Come to us and your life will get worse”? Of course not! They promise a better life here.

Second, postmodern hearers, who believe that all truths are small “t” truths, will receive this approach as “good, I’m glad that worked for you.” And sometimes they will then add that what works for them is Baha’i, or Zen, or therapy, or Prozac, or “I get high on life” or “I don’t need a crutch,” and so on.

I don’t think we should be selling Christianity as a means to make yourself happier in this life. I don’t see many happy people in the New Testament – I see many joyful people suffering under harsh conditions. And if you substitute a changed life for apologetics, then I really think you’ve gone wrong. The gospel is always presented as a true solution to the problem of sin – never as a placebo to make us feel better. Either it’s true or it isn’t – whether it makes us “better people” or not is irrelevant.

Polemics

Is having a burning bosom a good test for truth in religion?

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Here’s a good post from Biola University professor Clay Jones.

He’s talking about how Mormons embrace Mormonism because of a burning in their bosom. (A subjective feeling) In the quote below, I reproduce the main thrust of the post – which he makes as part of his conversation with some Mormon missionaries. If you ever run into Mormons, this might help you.

Excerpt:

I pointed out that the Mormons base the truth of their religion on a subjective personal experience—namely, they base the truth of Mormonism on praying a prayer to ask God whether the Book of Mormon is trustworthy and if they get a warm feeling, which is described in some of their works a “a burning in the bosom,” then they conclude that Mormonism is true. They agreed.

I said that we evangelicals base our faith in historic Christianity on the evidence of Jesus being raised from the dead.

[…]But then I pointed out that the Mormons base their beliefs on a subjective personal experience that has led them to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that historic Christianity is mistaken, that there was a great falling away, that there are many gods, that Mormons one day believe that they are going to become gods (just the males, actually), and that the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods still function today (they didn’t disagree with even one word of this). I explained that you couldn’t get any of these ideas from the New Testament.

He goes to explain why subjective experiences are unreliable for determining truth.

When facing Mormons, and other cults, I also argue against subjectivism. But I supplement that with evidence. For Mormons, I use scientific evidence for the creation of the universe out of nothing. Mormons think that the matter in the universe existed eternally. They don’t accept the Big Bang theory! So you just roll through the scientific advances, show that the cause of the universe was non-physical, eternal, powerful and endowed with free will (to create an effect in time without antecedent conditions), and that’s the end of that.

I think that people in cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science have similar ways of forming their beliefs. They just filter out evidence falsifying their religion. JWs made all kinds of silly predictions about the end of the world that are not true – they’re false prophets, in other words. And Christian Science thinks that Jesus didn’t actually die, which no credentialed historian believes. (Just like Islam)

UPDATE: ECM freaked out at me and he demands that I say that Mormons are my political allies on every issue. I just want to point out that this is true, although Mitt Romney is nothing but a big fat RINO.